“The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.” -John F. Kennedy

It is with a heavy heart that I must report the impending demise of the once great city of Hong Kong. The protests that have lasted for weeks in the face of escalating brutality by the pro-Beijing regime are about to come to an end. Unless an absolute miracle takes place, the protests will end not with the celebratory howls of a people that stood up for itself in the face of tyranny but in screams of horror as the good people of Hong Kong are crushed under the boot of steel and silicon that is the People’s Liberation Army.

The people of Hong Kong want to breathe clean air and walk freely down their streets without being beaten by police and choked to death with their own blood. Hongkongers, like all freedom-loving people, are self-deterministic and want to govern themselves. But in the eyes of Beijing, Hong Kong is China, and freedom and democracy are not a part of the Chinese Dream.

Resistance is a contagion that must be contained and squashed in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party. Independent thought is like Ebola to the Tyrant. The Hong Kong protests have gone from a nuisance to a virus that must be stopped before it spreads to the Mainland. In the last few days, Beijing has started labeling the Hong Kong protesters as terrorists, this is the last rhetorical step before Beijing begins to take truly violent action. If you couple this rhetoric with state-produced videos of PLA exercises and buildups on the Mainland, the message is clear: the Dragon is about to show its teeth.

Unfortunately, we don’t have to use too much imagination to conceptualize what a PLA crackdown will look like in Hong Kong. Tiananmen, Tibet, and Xinjiang are already bloody blueprints for such an operation. Thousands of people will be arrested, tortured, disappeared, interned in reeducation camps, and/or murdered in order to squash resistance. Then the PLA and PAP (People’s Armed Police) will establish a militarized, cyberpunk dystopia a la Xinjiang for as long as is necessary to ensure compliance. When the dust settles and the blood is mopped from the bullet-ridden streets, Hong Kong will look more like Pyongyang than a modern, prosperous, multicultural metropolis.

The most disgusting part of this whole ordeal is that more than likely the whole world will just sit and watch as Beijing once again crushes the spirit of liberty and human decency under tank treads. Before Hong Kong there was Xinjiang, Tibet, Tiananmen, in addition to the daily repression of the billion plus souls under Xi Jinping’s regime. And it won’t stop with Hong Kong either. Next time it’ll be Taiwan, Vietnam, or any other people that dare stand up to the CCP. The fire doesn’t stop at the borders, any state willing to murder its own people en masse will have little qualm with doing the same to others. But for now, we’ll just continue to watch the horrors of freedom’s main enemy play out on our screens. We’ll watch the Dragon flash his teeth and continue to tear the Western-led world order apart. Hongkongers will no doubt brave the storm and fight their best fight. Those who stand strong in the face of tyrants are the best among us, but so long as the CCP exists, we are all Hongkongers.